The journey to living by design.

Setting the Habits.

When my alarm chimes at 6:00am I am immediately seized with the urge to punch someone. I’m a teacher. It’s the summer. Who in their right mind is trying to wake me up? Oh right, me.

As I mentioned in my intro, I’ve been going to West London CrossFit for a while but I’ve been a part-time member. There’s nothing wrong with that. CrossFit sells 10 passes for a reason and going twice a week has improved my body shape and confidence. However, since I do have the summer off, (aside from teaching summer school online,) I decided to make going to the gym a more frequent habit. I wanted to move from twice a week to four or five times a week. It takes time to set habits. There’s no point in trying to start off going to the gym five times a week. After all, we don’t learn to drive by taking a cross-country trip. Instead, we start by driving around the block and then move to longer trips and highway driving later on. Building up our bodies is no different. We need to start in simple ways and then build to more frequent, more complex workouts over time.

I should mention that on the days I don’t go to CrossFit, I am not sitting on the couch, stuffing myself on nachos and cake. I supplement my CrossFit workouts with yoga, swimming, biking and hiking. Exercise helps me manage my anxiety and sleep better so as long as I do something active each day, I feel better. However, I have noticed that CrossFit gives me the best results for maintaining a healthy weight and improve my muscle tone, (and what girl doesn’t want a better bathing suit body?)

Right now, I’m up to going to CrossFit three to four times a week. It’s not always easy to get my butt to the gym. This morning two furry little people snuggled up to me and tried to convince me to hit the snooze button.

Could you say no to these faces?

Instead, I dragged myself up, ignored the sleepy meows of protest and stumbled to my office. Luckily this awaited me:

I laid out my workout gear the night before to help motivate me.

So now I have to sign off. I’ve got to get to CrossFit in time to do my mobility work.